This might ramble a bit but rather than trying to earn a living, spent much of today so far trying to solve the problem of the Central Powers AI teleporting those great big German colonial Corps to Europe. This is one of those irritating quirks that the game has always had and that has bugged me from Day-1, probably much more than it should have done.

I think we have a solution but it will need independent verification so I'll throw out the fix and anybody who wants it can try it out.

Am in the process of writing a brief modding guide for WW1G and so will go into some background as to my analysis of why this happens and what the cure appears to be. When I first offered up my assorted Naval Mods, one of the major amendments to Stock was locking the German colonial forces in place until the summer of 1916. Have made the case for doing this and for also supporting the way that the developers chose to greatly exaggerate that strength of these forces far beyond their historical combat-power but only if they cannot be used for the attack. These discussions may be found elsewhere and will not be repeated below.

WW1G is a very deep game and it turns out that merely closing one door does not necessarily keep the Askaris from teleporting to Prussia (or wherever) through another.

Locking the colonial forces required adding a War Plan Turn Rule for each German war plan to the [color="#00FF00"]WarPlanTurnRules.csv[/color] file found in the DB folder. This is a global file used when the game loads a new Grand Campaign, the turn rules are written into the saved games and will act until conditions for their cancellation are met. This might be a specific event, a specified Turn is reached or something else. The rules used to lock the German colonial forces in their deployment boxes is as follows:

Turn rules only apply during certain phases and as shown above in [color="#FF0000"]RED[/color], the specified units (GER_50_a for example) will only be locked (TR_Immobilized) during the Military Turn Phase (TP_Military).

So this works but the effects end Turn 18 by design. The only problem is that at some point the Askaris started to show up in Europe anyway and I could not figure out why, since the Turn Rule was present in the saved games and still active.

Various difficulty levels allow for certain AI behaviour and some of these may be found in the[color="#00FF00"] AIParamsTable.csv[/color] also found in the DB folder. This is a global file interrogated whenever the game is loaded and so changes here will appear when a saved game is loaded. It turns out that one parameter DL2 shown below in [color="#00FF00"]GREEN[/color] allowed the AI to redeploy any unit anywhere regardless of locked status or location. Human players are not allowed to redeploy units outside of its Front but the AI can do so provided the value entered in this Player configurable file (shown in [color="#FF0000"]RED[/color]) is equal to or less than the difficulty level set by the Player.

Therefore if you set the minimum difficulty at 3 and play on a difficulty level of 4, you may get teleporting Askaris appear when the AI redeploys although during the Military Phase, the units themselves should remain locked in their new locations. At a difficulty level of 5 (the hardest) the potential will always exist for this to happen. Punching in new values (6 or -1 for example) and even deleting the entire parameter makes zero difference, the game's default seems to allow the AI free redeployment regardless of front boundaries and all this parameter does is limit this ability depending upon the Player selected difficulty. Also the AI looks like it groups all the colonial boxes into one front so even if you set this parameter to 5 and play at difficulty 3, Askaris may not show up in Europe but the could in appear Qin Tao or any of the other unconquered German-owned colonial movement boxes.

Time spent chasing this down was not wasted though since it opened the door to a solution, Immobilization during the Redeployment Phase.

The Turn Rules to do this have to go into the [color="#00FF00"]WarPlanTurnRules.csv[/color] file with an entry for each German war plan and the text for them is below. The leading number (894 for example) is the next number in the sequence of war plan turn rules and those shown may or may not match your particular file.

Inserting these turn rules seems to finally serve to keep the Askaris out of East Prussia altogether but additional testing is probably required. You can do this by copy-pasting the above text, just make sure that the line numbers are sequential and start from the last line in the file.

For those using my Grand Campaign Naval Mod, here is a JSGME ready fix where the above edits have been done for you and it may be activated over the active Naval Mod or subsequently deactivated restoring the mod to its current state. It will kick in when the next campaign game is started and affects Player or AI Germany equally.

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As always, offered up without warranties. Save your original game files somewhere safe before editing and I hope this works and improves your WW1G experience a bit. Please post comments, problems or suggestions here, thanks in advance.